Anaesthesia came out of my speaker as the voice of an old friend. In the car I was held still and warm and felt like I was pouring over some piece of nostalgia from school, remembering, "This is why we were inseperable then."

With grey spanish moss hanging above the set, a woman in a white dress leaning over a white balcony, and other details not forgotten, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" was playing in the local Phoenix Theater to the TS Eliot that plays in my head and thinks "of all the hands/That are raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms" and then at night pulling curtains against the moon....and Louisiana just clicked for me then and there.

On the farthest shore, a diva of the moon (and stars) wanted another earth and someone who would listen. And for a time, I was content with that.

In Colorado there was an old woman Stacey told me of, a chattering old bird, twittering on about her lost silver mine to anyone who would ask if only they would have the courage to knock on her door. Stacey did, and she told me the old woman's stories as she showed me pictures of mountains and snow and smiled and wondered if in the winter when the baby came she would have the courage to move with the father up to Buffalo. She didn't. I imagine he's adapting to Ann Arbor well enough. No matter where you go, you never leave the midwest behind. And if he needs to feel at home, the snow is still there, and if he drives down the highway he can turn around and pull out a mirror and the lakeshore will appear in front of him, facing west, just as he remembers.